Fedlet development is currently DORMANT

PLEASE NOTE: At present (October 2016), I do not have any time to work on Fedlet. Through the magic of Google, this looks like a current effort to get Linux (Ubuntu) running on Baytrail / Cherrytrail devices; you might want to try that.

Fedlet

This is Fedlet, a Fedora remix for Intel Bay Trail-based tablet devices with 32-bit firmwares. Particularly the Dell Venue 8 Pro, which is what I have. It has been reported to work on the Lenovo Miix 2 and Asus T100. It may work on the Toshiba Encore and any other 32-bit firmware Bay Trail-based tablet.

It’s based on Fedora 23, more or less – but it has a slightly patched kernel, and a few other tweaks. Some of the Bay Trail support is not yet complete, and testers on various devices have reported instability. So this is not yet stable release quality, but it’s appropriate for playing around with these devices. Seriously, I mean it’s pretty experimental and nothing is guaranteed. This is for playing around and helping to make things better, it’s not a production OS. Please don’t install this if for some reason your Intel tablet is your primary work device or something.

Updated to 3.16 kernel with small Baytrail patch set, native modesetting should now work, no more hard-coded resolution hacks needed

Sound driver and firmware included (but you still need to load a correct ALSA config to hear sound)

Partial support for Venue 8 Pro built-in wireless (firmware included)

Hardware button support for Venue 8 Pro

Battery status support

Install broken (missing efibootmgr)

20140310

Fifth release of Fedlet

Fedlet 20140310 for 8″, 800×1280 tablets

Updated base packages and kernel

Xorg hack to allow windows with integrated title bars to be dragged in GNOME (from Jan-Michael Brummer)

20140226

Fourth release of Fedlet

Latest Fedora Rawhide base

Kernel update: based on latest Rawhide, sound (and LPSS) support built in (but not working until you provide fw_sst_0f28.bin* in /usr/lib/firmware/intel and apply this mixer config), shutdown/reboot should work on Venue 8 Pro, T100 and Miix 2

GNOME Terminal added to the Dash for convenience

Updated the patched anaconda to latest Rawhide

LibreOffice dropped to save space (I doubt anyone wants to use it on a tablet much…)

20140221

Third release of Fedlet

Fix kernel performance regression

Touch input rotation seems to work automagically now, so drop it from v8p-rotate (it’s now just a simple xrandr wrapper)

Add a 10in (T100) build (untested)

20140220

Second release of Fedlet

Repository configuration added (package: fedlet-repo)

Useless custom build of xorg-x11-drv-intel dropped

Kernel up to 3.14rc3 with some patches upstreamed, display hotplug reversion patch dropped and video= parameter adjusted to allow display to work with the hotplug reversion patch dropped

Partly working

Suspend (kinda works since kernel 3.16 or so, but screen backlight may stay on, and various things may not survive the resume, e.g. touchscreen or rotation)

Not working

Venue 8 Pro onboard Bluetooth

Icon for rotation app is invisible with recent GNOME

Most likely lots of other things

Unknown (please let me know!)

Hardware support (wireless, bluetooth etc) on devices other than Venue 8 Pro

Usage

Not for 64-bit firmwares

64-bit firmware Bay Trail devices are showing up now: I wouldn’t recommend using Fedlet on those, probably, as most of the point of Fedlet is to be a 32-bit UEFI image for the 32-bit firmware Bay Trail devices. If you have a 64-bit firmware Bay Trail device, I’d probably suggest installing Fedora 21 Beta (or a Final TC/RC) then updating to a 3.18 kernel from the rawhide-kernel-nodebug repository. I could do a 64-bit build of the Fedlet kernel and the few other divergent packages, I guess.

Writing the image to USB

You can follow the standard Fedora USB writing instructions – both livecd-iso-to-disk --format --reset-mbr --efi and dd like methods should work. Do not use Rufus, unetbootin or any other ‘smart’ third party USB stick writer. They rarely work correctly, especially for UEFI booting. Tools that work like dd (several are mentioned on the page linked above) are fine.

Booting from USB on Venue 8 Pro

To boot from USB on the Venue 8 Pro, turn it off, connect the USB stick, then hold down the volume up button immediately after pressing the power button, until you see the Dell logo. This should take you into a boot menu from which you can pick your USB stick. You can also hold volume down to get into the firmware UI, where you can go to the Boot tab and move the USB stick up to the top position in the boot order (see note above about how different boot paths impact graphics).

Notes and tips

Native graphics on Venue 8 Pro

It seems to vary between devices, but I have found that graphics don’t work properly on the Venue 8 Pro (screen goes black when KMS kicks in) if you boot normally or through the firmware UI (hold volume down on boot). KMS always works if you boot through the boot device menu (hold volume up on boot). If you have a V8P and you’re getting the black-screen-on-boot problem, try different boot paths.

Sound

On most hardware, you should be able to make sound work with this ALSA state file. Download it and run alsactl -f /path/to/t100_B.state restore.

Connecting USB devices

If you don’t know this already you probably shouldn’t be playing with Fedlet, but in order to connect any USB devices, you need something called a “USB OTG cable”, which basically turns the micro-USB port on the tablet into a ‘regular’ USB port you can plug keyboards and USB sticks and things into. Available at any decent parts retailer for about $5, or any big box electronics store for about $25. Your choice.

If wifi isn’t working on your device, you can plug in a wireless USB adapter if you have a USB OTG adapter. I’m using an Asus USB-N10, it should work out of the box.

For ease of testing it’s probably a good idea to have a USB hub you can plug a wireless adapter (if needed), USB stick(s) and keyboard into.

Firefox extensions

Video playback acceleration

If you are legally allowed to – I can’t tell you whether you are or not, I am not a lawyer – you can install the libva-intel-driver package from RPM Fusion’s free repository. This will enable hardware-accelerated video playback in any app which speaks libva (for me, it fails on quite a few videos, have to dig into that).

Installation

If you’re very, very bold, you should be able to install Fedlet. On the Venue 8 Pro, the internal storage has a fairly big NTFS partition with Windows on it, and a bunch of smaller partitions. I’d recommend just destroying the big Windows partition and installing into that space: the other partitions are system and recovery partitions, if you leave them intact, it should be possible to recover the Windows installation later if you want to (I have not tested this).

If you do install this, get kernel updates from [my repository][19], and don’t install official kernel updates from the Fedora repos. We’re trying to get all the patches merged ASAP. I’ll try and remember to put updated kernel builds in my repo regularly. Stock kernels will now boot, at least, but (as of 3.16) shutdown/reboot may not work, battery status won’t work, and Venue 8 Pro wifi won’t work.

On the Venue 8 Pro at least, the firmware has an irritating habit of putting the Windows boot loader back at the top of the UEFI boot manager list if you attach or remove USB sticks (or sometimes, just for giggles). If you boot it with this setup it’ll go into Windows auto-recovery. I haven’t been brave enough to see what this does yet, I just force power off and go back into the firmware and put Fedlet (“Generic”) back at the top of the list.

What’s in it that’s different from Fedora?

The ‘sources’ for the outside-of-Fedora stuff that’s included in the image can be found in this github repository. There are:

Some kernel patches in the kernel/ directory which are applied to the kernel package in the image

Some Xorg config snippets and a trivial utility for rotating the screen on the Venue 8 Pro, in the xorg/ directory

The kickstart used to build the image, and a patch to python-imgcreate for building UEFI bootable 32-bit live images, in the ks/ directory

The patch that (hopefully) makes installation work smoothly in the anaconda/ directory

The necessary firmware for the Venue 8 Pro’s wifi adapter in the baytrail-firmware/ directory

The repository definition for the fedlet repo in the fedlet-repo/ directory

A (hopefully) working ALSA configuration file in the alsa/ directory

The packages that differ from pure Fedora Rawhide are all available from [this repository][19]. There is:

A backport of Rawhide’s linux-firmware package, which contains the firmware needed for the sound adapter

All the variant packages have the dist tag ‘awb’ to make them easily distinguishable from official Fedora packages (except the linux-firmware package, which is just a backport).

The image should be roughly reproducible by just building a live image, using the kickstart, from a running Fedora 21 system, after applying the patch to python-imgcreate’s /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/imgcreate/live.py.

I cannot take any of the credit for the hard work on this: all I’ve done is write silly little scripts and stick the bits together. Multiple folks at Intel, Red Hat and elsewhere have done the tough work. An especial big thanks to Alan Coxm Aubrey Li, and Mika Westerberg at Intel, Jan-Michael Brummer at IAV (formerly of Intel), and Kalle Valo at Qualcomm (for the V8P wifi) who are really pushing the thing along.

Yes, I believe there are systems out there with 64-bit firmwares now. Fedlet is not for them. If someone wanted to take the bits of Fedlet that might be useful to a 64-bit firmware Baytrail system and use them, then godspeed, but I don’t have one and I’m not going to build a 64-bit Fedlet blind.

Awesome work on the fedlet!! I have been messing with some generic BayTrail m$ tabs and so far, Fedlet is the only one that is even half stable. Rather super stable after I got the 3.19 rc5 kernel in. Ran the last available image you had ..201412? as a usb base,/ rufus imaged and customized the efi config for use on all my systems. Basically just rename the usb dev in the efi string.. 6 occurrences in mine. Anyway, for the life of me I cannot get the the sdio and half the HCI dev up. cannot even SEE the rtl8723bs to even start to compile drivers. Bios related as I have the MP-BIOS bug.~IO-APIC error on boot. Recommendations?

could it be posible that you could make your installation medie on a .img or .iso and place it where I and others could download and test?
I have a Lenovo MIIX2 and it has some problems whith clocksource, and maybe the 3.19 kernel helps on this…’

dirty edited the 20141209 img off adamw and edited all the destination strings in the efi.conf from my *butu box where it pointed to the drive name and renamed it to the current dev name. example: rufus renames usb to 20141209-FE instead of the whole 20141209-fedlet…. rename only occurrences of direct path to current dev name/path

Lenovo is infamous for using several instances of RTC in individual components. That and the BatteryManagementFirmware to motherboard clock on the ideabook 530’s epic failure when the windows efi wasn’t there to manage the routing. If I remember there was an odd voodoo fix for linux based installs on the last few generations of devices where if you removed the battery and power and held the power button for 70 seconds, the firmware override was disabled and allowed linux acpi or something to that effect. I’ll talk to a few of the Lenovo devs and support to see if I can get anything there but no guarantee. I am focusing on the Microcenter’s Winbook series. Looks like there are a lot of software level bridges between devices that are all proprietary to the new M$ systems. Even the UEFI has software keys and licensing for windows burned in.

Nice work! Got it up and running on live USB stick in just a few minutes on my Toshiba Encore 2. I’ve got an SD card in the tablet, and I can access it while in the live account. I’m going to download the tarball for the RTL8723bs driver onto it and see if I can get the wifi running. Looks like the Fedlet development environment is missing some packages – does anyone know if I can just download stock Fedora 21 kernel header rpms and so forth?

What I mean is that most OS aren’t really suspending the tablet… though that is an option, frequently it seems that the machine goes into a low power state, low enough that it can still run yet appear off. What is the expected/desired behavior of the power button? (Should it work like my N900 phone where it would simply shut the screen off, and background apps/networking still continue to run?)

The other issue I’m wondering about my tablet (Nextbook 8) is that the power switch does not seem to flag events to acpi. The button is basically dead after startup, except for holding it down for a few seconds will force power off. Anyone have this power button working when it doesn’t seem to be enumerated in an ACPI method? What hardware do you have that’s like this?

rawrite32 should be fine. did you read the note about booting through the UEFI boot menu?

I had that thing where it kept going into the ‘test mode’ for a while, bizarrely. couldn’t figure out what was triggering it. it suddenly stopped doing it after a few days. if you Google around, it seems to be a common thing with Dells.

I’m back to blaming the eMMC. Fedlet seems allright until I touch the eMMC, then clocksource goes out the window and all hell breaks loose. TC lives happily on the machine (or rather on an usb drive), maybe because it can’t seem to find the eMMC.
Odd, really odd.

There’s actually a patch I put in the busted 3.19 build which may help with the eMMC stuff. I really will try and get a better 3.19 build done soon, but you could try applying it locally, if you’re set up for kernel builds. I just shoved it to baytrail-m:

This patch will probably help – I ran the latest image (20141209, 10th Fedlet rel) on Lenovo Miix 2 10 yesterday, generated a bug report package from crashing installer and uploaded to my server over scp – WIFI worked fine. I investigated to logs in more detail and the kernel error messages related to mmcblk0rpmb are exactly what is described in the patch message. If you’ve already built the image with newer kernel and this patch included, please share.

This might be Android x86 specific, but has anyone gotten any kernel newer than 3.18.2 running on the Venue 8 Pro?
If so, does the touch screen get stuck in the “touched” state very often when using the touch screen? I’m trying to figure out if it’s the android-specific patches or an upstream problem (or something else).
This happens with all of the newer kernels I attempt to incrementally patch up to, even though boot finishes completely.

Hello all. I am trying to capture sound from the internal microphone of the Dell Venue 8 Pro 5830 and I am only getting static. I am running a compiled 3.18 kernel that incorporates by default the patch by Jan-Michael Brummer. Are there certain alsamixer options that should be enabled? I have played with the alsamixer settings with no luck.

I switched to working with this tablet because sound does not work at all on most of the other Bay Trail tablets and the bug thread on missing sound has not moved along at all even after I opened up my Stream 7 and posted pictures of the inside and offered to probe with a multimeter. Most of these devices are useless to me without working sound playback and capture. A pocketable device lends itself to voice communications but that is not possible on these devices. I am feeling a little cheated because I started this arduous install process after reading of microphone support on this device here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83851 . I really did not want to have to setup yet another broken Intel device. I have plenty of experience with that already. No, this is just another dead end because there are 1, maybe 2 kernel developers working on audio for Intel tablets despite Intel’s astronomical profits. I have no doubt this will be working though, right around 2-3 years from now when the microusb connector and battery is worn out and the web has moved on to the point that these devices are unable to even browse. Already this device cannot even be bought new anymore and it is barely supported! By the time support is added it will be an exercise in futility. Good show Intel/Dell/HP and others. I apologize for anyone hit with any errant flames.

Hi, I have the same issue (no sound from internal mic) with an asus t100 and fedlet/ubuntu and kernel 3.18/3.19.
Uptonow, I’m recording audio from an external mic connected to the minijack port in the tablet. In my experience, JM Brummer’s patches enabled mic support only from an external device. I tried almost all possible configuration with alsamixer without any luck. Any fix would be really appreciated.

Hey Fedlet fans – so as I’ve been kinda slacking on Fedlet lately I figured that along with spending a few hours trying to get a 3.20 build done (that’s just finishing ATM) I’d push my actual kernel package repo out somewhere where you can find it, instead of just the patch directory in baytrail-m which I only intermittently resync.

that’s now my upstream for the ‘baytrail’ kernel branch that all fedlet kernel builds come from.

One caveat: to keep merges manageable, at each package build I apply some changes that are never actually checked into git: adding the changelog entry, disabling debugging options (if necessary) and disabling the separate debug kernel builds (if necessary). That is, after pushing all the rest of the changes, I do this:

then I build the SRPM (‘fedpkg srpm’) and run the build as a Koji scratch build (only Fedora packagers can do this, but you can of course build the SRPM locally or in the clean rebuild environment of your choice).

I hope this should make it easier for folks to do their own fedlet kernel builds.

If you want to set up your own experimental branch and be able to resync against the Fedora changes, set up a new remote pointing to git://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/kernel.git and merge into your branch from that remote’s master branch. I recommend doing merges, not rebases; given the fedlet workflow of ‘add a patch, then remove it when it gets merged upstream’ the diff from fedlet to master at any given time is quite small but the commit series to get there can be quite long and complex, and rebases often fail. I just merge in from Fedora master to the fedlet ‘baytrail’ branch periodically.

adamw
We appreciate all of the work. And I’m sure more than a few people would click a buy me a beer icon if you had one. AFAIK Fedlet is the best hope of getting a linux distro on a tablet or at least this later generation of tablets.

adamw and all others I really appreciate the work been done. I would love to get my Lenovo Miix2 to run fedora.

I can’t figure out how to setup enviorement to make own kernel or own install media. Is there any hope that updated fedlet install iso is comming? or is there some good step bby step guide for setting up and make own iso ?

How to get that kernel into the install ISO? or do I install the 20141209 iso and do yum update (which is diffucult as the maschine only runs a short time before stalling – i think it is clocksource related).

I built an image earlier this week based on f21. Still same issues with clocksource and for some reason I had to give the kernel parameter apm=off to get it to boot since otherwise it would suspend during boot.
Gonna fiddle around some more and see what I can work out.
The Miix 2 seems to be a formidable opponent 🙂

Something like ‘cd /; patch < python-imgcreate-32uefi.patch ‘. It’s possible it no longer applies cleanly and you might find it easier just to hand-patch the file with the changes. I actually just keep a copy of the ‘fedlet version’ of the file lying around and copy it over the real one whenever I want to make an image.

hello, i have a mediacom winpad x100, intel bay trail and 32bit bootloader, suitable for fedlet i think… but ti won’t boot, i have disabled secure boot and fastboot,from uefi bios i can find the usb bootable key, but it doesn’t boot anyway. somebody can help me?
thankyou

Forgive me for Hi-Jacking this thread a little… On the Dell Venue Pro 8’s folio there is a Dell insignia about 1.25 inches in diameter. I would like to replace this with a little Tux embroidered patch (https://github.com/t2b/embroidery/tree/master/tux) is anyone interested in splitting the cost of this? The first patch is ~$50 and then ~$6 per patch after that (unless you can find a better deal).

So now I have a dual-booting Venue 8 Pro, thank you 😉
What I recognized: gnome-shell always uses ~100 % CPU load, the system is very laggy. In your video, your system just works flawlessly… I checked glxinfo and it says that direct rendering is activated, any ideas?

The video’s very old with like a 3.11 kernel, lots changed since then, sometimes better sometimes worse…:P

glxinfo ‘direct rendering’ doesn’t really mean anything any more and hasn’t for a long time, it says that even when software rendering is being used. What you want to look at is the ‘OpenGL renderer string’, and make sure it doesn’t say anything about LLVM…what does that say?

ok, I now used the liveusb-creator-3.12.0 under Windows (instead of Rufus) to create a bootable USB drive and here I can boot Fedlet on my Toshiba Encore 8, but only when I select the troubleshooting option. Otherwise the screen is black.

Touch only work for click/tap, but no scrolling or zoom.
The CPU usage is a bit high (between 60 and 80%), so the UI is slow.

allows passing through installation on one of the boots where the mmc access hasn’t broken down (starting the installer from the dash tends to break it always; both with errors regarding rpmb and other partitions.)

After having installed, many things work: multitouch on the 1920×1200 IPS display, charging, folio case keyboard/touchpad, lidswitch on folio case, suspends .. but the backlight stays on. Use of microsd slot with caveat;.. fedlet dies of mmc errors if booted with card inserted; it must be hotplugged (might be possible to work-around by disabling some things in the installed image, a shared data disk for win8/linux seems useful on this thing).

Need to buy a USB wifi dongle to get it online and investiagate audio and wifi further.

The normal installer kept locking up at 100%. After this the first boot took waaaaay long, but now I’m running it from my t100’s internal storage. Touch screen is only working as left click, but in the installer it was working as touch screen, so I should be able to get it working.

Small note, I tried the install again to see what is working, and it seems that the only successful install is when I use the btrfs partitioning. LVM or Traditional Partitioning seems to crash the installer.

I’ve got my notes on getting the hardware of Lenovo Miix 3 working with linux at http://pippin.gimp.org/miix3/ see the README file, the folder also contains various output logs using the 3.20 fedlet kernel. Using a USB wifi on an OTG adapter makes the machine with its touchpad/keyboard base a useful linux laptop with more than 5h battery life (haven’t really timed it).

Looks great! I also have the Miix 3 10″.
I will try to install the latest fedlet. Right now i’m running Arch Linux off a USB with the same hw issues you have, but have wifi working using http://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs

I tried buildling 4.0.0rc3 on the lenovo miix 3; it doesn’t seem like the backlight/sound issues I’m having are fixed. I didn’t apply all the fedlet/fedora patches from the 3.20rc kernel or fully replicate the config; will test again if a kernel appears in the repos – since some of the designware DMA changes to the kernel sounds like it could have impact on making sound work.

I did a kernel 4.0 RC4 build with the latest upstream backlight/panel control proposal, but it seems completely busted for me – seems to be completely dead right from grub. Does it work for anyone else?

I’ll test tonight. I thought that has been nagging me is that in order to get traction and shift pressure from your back perhaps we could set up a testing repo and have nightly builds or something. That way we could have more people collaborating and have I more straight forward way for people to test it out. I wouldn’t have to be that advanced and complex. I would be happy to be more involved and I believe a few others would be so too.

I tried kernel 4.0.0rc3 on Gentoo and it behaved no differently on my tablet as 3.19 with respect to the screen blanking out during boot, or backlight. xrandr rotating the display reenables the screen after it blanks out during boot initialization.

However the rtl8723bs driver, at least the copy I pulled from the repo a few days ago, no longer compiles with kernel 4.0.0rc3. This is a bit depressing…

I do have to mention my failed kernel 4.0.0rc4 and failed kernel 4.0.0rc5 uses this forked codeTom/rtl8723bs hack. I can’t yet rule out but don’t know why the hacks that were done in this fork would cause the dmesg spam that causes journald to go bonkers…

Also would like to report that the 4.0.0rc3 kernel I tried suspend/resume for the first time. “Suspending” the tablet, the backlight remains on but the screen goes “blank”. The side buttons seem to be able to resume it but not sure which button (perhaps any button) lets it resume after a few seconds. The rtl8723bs wifi and touch screen are nonfunctional upon “resume”.

Currently trying to build kernel 4.0.0rc7 … can’t wait to get a version of the kernel that’s “stable”… or at least something that I can actually use the tablet for day-to-day use even if it’s rough on the edges.

I just found out why I couldn’t build the live images I wanted to build. Once again it was systemd, many thanks to Lennart Poettering for that marvelous contribution to the open source world. It’s pulseaudio all over again.
Sorry, I know I’m ranting, I’ll get some coffee and calm down.

The kernel I only have my HPET hack. But I don’t think it has anything to do with it.

I just built kernel 4.0.0-rc5 and the behavior is the same. Ugh. Trying to revert back to my 3.19rc4 kernel .config to see if it will work again starting from that. I deleted my 4.0.0rc3 config prematurely 🙁

All further kernels of fedlet or rawhide (3.18,3.20, 4.0.0-rc3 and rc4 ) tested, but I cannot get lucky with any of these…

3.18 => still RPMBs / timeouts with mmc
3.20 => DRM / i915 errors on yoga 2 (not tested on Dell Venue Pro 8, its battery/-charging system is dead now )
=> the drm erros seems to be tangled with the screen goes black while booting… or is another issue on its own.

When booting 3.18 or 3.20 I’l often got only a black screen on yoga 2, to prevent this I have to add nomodeset as kernel boot parameter.
The issues with drm seems to be the cause of the slow GUI /Gnome-shell. Its uses 400% CPU !!!

After some minutes I see in dmesg errors of watchdog / process hangs timeouts:
3 CPU Cores are affected:

So, if I install the latest Fedlet ISO above – which kernel would you recommend to go to afterwards? I’m looking for stability I guess. I understand there are some issues with the newest ones – should I stick to the one that comes with it?

There are no stable kernels at the moment. Depending on your exact hardware different kernels will have different issues.
You probably have to test it yourself, but be warned, there are no stable kernels.

Thanks for the response – I’m hoping that MMC hangs will stop at least some time in the future. I’m currently trying different kernels etc to find the one which hangs the least. This is a great learning experience, that’s for sure!

I backtracked to my 3.19rc4 config and was able to get 4.0.0rc7 to boot into Gentoo/systemd/Gnome-3.14 (hardware=Yi fang M890) once more. However I may have screwed up my HPET hacks in the last few attempts as HPET isn’t working anymore – refined-jiffies are used and the GUI is excruciatingly slow once again.

4.0.0rc7 looks no different than how far 3.19rc4 ran pretty much, no improvements that I can tell 🙁

Apparently some machines have the eMMC issues and some do not, please mention what machine you have.
My Yi-Fang M890 appears to have no problems with accessing the eMMC except for this warning during boot:

i915 seems broken in 4.0.
I need nomodeset otherwise Xorg as well as console would be blank.
Backlight is on but screen is blank.
magic unblanking command “xrandr –output DSI1 –rotate right” doesn’t work anymore.

I also just built Linux 4.0.0-release .. behaves the exact same way as the RC’s… and my hpet hack doesn’t work. I guess I can blow away 4.0.0 rc3 and rc7 now, since 4.0.0 release behaves the same way…

Nextbook8: nomodeset not used, screen blacks out but xrandr will reenable screen. Backlight is stuck on. Oopses in the intel DRM driver. Very slow operation due to refined-jiffies clocksource. Sound doesn’t work. Not much else is new…

I tried to boot 20141209-fedlet-i686.iso on my Dell Venue 8 Pro from USB. In order to do so, I copied the iso with dd to an USB stick (I tried a 2GB and a 32GB stick). I switch off secure boot and fast boot in the BIOS. After that the USB stick is detected; however booting fails with “invalid magic number”.

what is your CONFIG_TOUCHSCREEN_GOODIX ?? and CONFIG_BMG160 ?? (G-sensor)
Does i915 hardware acceleration actually work ? (i.e. Does video playback not slow down when using refined-jiffies clocksource or you just run everything with tsc clocksource without problem ? )

I just ordered a Toshiba Click Mini, and am hoping to run Fedlet on it, I will post back here when I have received it and run some diagnostics on it to see what hardware it has. I shall be quite disappointed if it won’t boot linux.

I have to say I’m quite impressed with the functionality on the Dell Venue Pro 8. I got a el cheapo tablet and it worked semi well but it was quite slow, wifi was broken as well. After seeing that then running this on the DVP8 it was like night and day.